ArabTeX, a macro package for use with TeX, the powerful typesetting system designed by D. E. Knuth, and LaTeX, its extension by L. Lamport to handle structured documents, was initially designed to support Arabic quotations inside scholarly texts written in some Western language. A prototype was released in the fall of 1991, and since then there have been two major revisions, extending the capabilities of the system far beyond the original goals.

The current version supports several different languages all using the Arabic script, and also a variety of different input notations. In this paper we discuss some of the problems which must be resolved in a multi-lingual system, and we present some local solutions as implemented inside ArabTeX.